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by GeompMankle 1262 days ago
I generalized. To be specific, the interesting part of liturgical and most classical organ music requires an advanced understanding of harmony and nuance that the typical average citizen of the Earth will rarely accumulate the hundreds to thousands of hours that it takes to appreciate in context. For most people, it's like watching 2700 ELO chess masters play without a commentator: hard to appreciate. On the other hand, for me organs are really fun to listen to so I will put up with classical and liturgical music even if it kind of puts me to sleep and because I've listened to it enough that I can deal. Frankly, sometimes the best part of the typical liturgical organ experience is during the time they are tuning the organ before the audience arrives. I can listen to individual pipes beating against each other and the tuning process a lot longer than I can handle something like Jean Guillou's Improvisations for Christmas.

More power to the folks who can stomach classical organ music though. You guys pay the bills for the rest of us who want to hear melodies we recognized.

However, the organ (particular symphonic organ and theatre variants) are frankly pretty adept at translations of music that is rhythmically and familiar to popular music trends of the last 60 years. In this case, the listener doesn't have to be nearly as intimately familiar with the trends of music between the 1700s and before the date their grandparents were born.